Circle of Friends

by Maeve Binchy

  Eve felt guilty. “I’m sorry, I’m really making a mess of your first day of term. This is not what you need.”

  They had reached the corner of St. Stephen’s Green. The traffic lights were green and they started to cross the road.

  “Look at the style,” Benny said wistfully. Already they could see students in duffel coats, laughing and talking. They could see girls with ponytails and college scarves walking in easy friendship with boys along the damp slippery footpaths up toward Earlsfort Terrace. Some did walk on their own, but they had great confidence. Just beside them Benny noticed a blond girl in a smart navy coat; despite the rain, she still looked elegant.

  They were all crossing together when they saw the skid, the boy on the motorbike, out of control and plowing toward the sedate black Morris Minor. It all seemed like slow motion, the way the boy fell and the bike swerved and skidded. How the car tried to avoid it and how both motorbike and car came sideways into the group of pedestrians crossing the wet street.

  Eve heard Benny cry out, and then she saw the faces frozen as the car came toward her. She didn’t hear the screams because there was a roaring in her ears as she lost consciousness, pinned by the car to the lamppost. Beside her lay the body of the boy Francis Joseph Hegarty, who was already dead.

  FOUR

  Everyone said afterward that it was a miracle that more people hadn’t been killed or injured. It was another miracle that it was so near the hospital, and that the driver of the car, who had been able to step out of it without any aid, had in fact been a Fitzwilliam Square doctor himself, who had known exactly what to do. Clutching a handkerchief to his face, he felt blood over his eye but he assured them it was superficial, he gave instructions which were followed to the letter. Someone was to hold up the traffic, another to get the guards, but first someone was sent down the side lane toward St. Vincent’s Hospital to alert casualty and summon help. Dr. Foley knelt beside the body of the boy whose motorbike had lost control. He closed his own eyes to give a silent prayer of relief that his own son had never wanted to ride a machine like this.

  Then he closed the eyes of the boy with the broken neck, and placed a coat over him to keep him from the eyes of the students he would never get to know. The small girl with the wound in her temple had a slightly slow pulse and could well be concussed. But he did not think her condition critical. Two other girls had been grazed and bruised, and were obviously suffering from shock. He himself had bitten his tongue from what he could feel in his mouth, probably loosened a couple of teeth and had a flesh wound over his eye. His task now was to get things into the hands of the professionals before he asked anyone to take his blood pressure for him.

  One of the injured girls, a big, soft-faced girl with chestnut-colored hair and dark, sensible clothes, seemed very agitated about the one lying unconscious on the ground.

  “She’s not dead is she?” The eyes were round in horror.

  “No, no, I’ve felt her pulse. She’s going to be fine,” he soothed her.

  “It’s just that she didn’t have any life.” The girl’s eyes were full of tears.

  “None of you have yet, child.” He averted his glance from the dead boy.

  “No. Eve in particular. It would be terrible if she weren’t all right.” She bit her lip.

  “I’ve told you. You must believe me, and here they are …” The stretchers had been brought the couple of hundred yards from the hospital. There wasn’t even a need for an ambulance.

  Then the guards were there, and the people directing the traffic properly and the little procession moved toward the hospital. Benny was limping slightly and she paused to lean on the girl with the blond curly hair that she had noticed seconds before the accident.

  “Sorry,” said Benny, “I didn’t know if I could walk or not.”

  “That’s all right. Did you hurt your leg?”

  She tested it, leaning on it. “No, it’s not much. What about you?”

  “I don’t know. I feel all right, really. Maybe too all right. Perhaps we’ll keel over in a moment.”

  Ahead of them on the stretcher was Eve, her face white. Benny had picked up Eve’s handbag, a small cheap plastic one which Mother Francis had bought for her in Peggy Pine’s shop as a Going to Dublin present a few weeks ago.

  “She’s going to be fine, I think,” Benny explained in a shaky voice. “The man with all the blood on him, the man driving the car, he says she’s breathing and her pulse is all right.”

  Benny looked so worried that anyone would have wanted to take her in their arms and stroke her, even though she was bigger than most people around.

  The girl with the beautiful face, now grazed and muddy, the girl in the well-cut navy coat, now streaked with blood and wet mud, looked at Benny kindly.

  “That man’s a doctor. He knows these things. My name is Nan Mahon, what’s yours?”

  It was the longest day they had ever known.

  The hospital machinery moved into action, but slowly. The guards took charge of the dead boy as regards telling his family. They had been through his things. His address was on a lot of his belongings. They had deputed two young guards to go out to Dun Laoghaire.

  “Can you tell her it was instantaneous?” John Foley said.

  “I don’t know,” said the young officer. “Can we tell her that?”

  “It’s true, and it might be some comfort to her,” John Foley said mildly.

  The older Garda sergeant had a different view.

  “You never know, Doctor, many a mother might like to think their son had time to whisper an Act of Contrition.”

  John Foley turned his head away lest his annoyance be seen.

  “And it wasn’t his fault, be sure to tell her that,” he tried.

  “I’m afraid my men can’t …” the sergeant began.

  “I know, I know.” The doctor sounded weary.

  The nurse said of course they could use the phone, but they should have themselves looked at first. Then they’d be in a position to tell their parents what had happened. It made a lot of sense.

  The news was good: minor cuts, nothing deep, anti-tetanus injections just in case, mild sedative for shock.

  Eve was a different matter. Cracked ribs and mild concussion. Several stitches at the edge of her eye, and a broken wrist. She would be in hospital for several days, possibly a week. They wanted to know whom to inform.

  “Give me a minute,” Benny said.

  “Well, you must know who it is, you’re her friend.” The almoner was puzzled.

  “Yes, but it’s not that easy.”

  “Well, what about her wallet?”

  “There’s nothing in it, no next-of-kin or anything. Please let me think, I just want to work out what’s best.”

  Benny was also putting off telling her own parents about the accident, but she had to decide which of the two nuns to talk to on Eve’s behalf. Would Eve be furious if Mother Francis heard the whole earning of the lies, the unhappiness and the circumstances that had brought her to the other side of the city and now into a hospital bed?

  Would Mother Clare be as bad as Eve had said?

  The woman was a nun after all, she must have some redeeming qualities if she were to keep her vows all her life.

  Benny’s head ached as she tried to work it all out.

  “Would it be any help to tell me?” Nan Mahon asked. They had cups of sweet milky tea and they sat at a table.

  “It’s like a Grimms’ fairy tale,” Benny said.

  “Tell it,” Nan said.

  So Benny told it, feeling slightly disloyal.

  Nan listened and asked questions.

  “Ring Mother Francis,” she said at the end. “Tell her that Eve was about to ring her today.”

  “But she wasn’t.”

  “It’ll make the nun feel better, and what does it matter what day she was going to ring?”

  It made sense. It made a lot of sense.

  “But what about Mother Clare?”

 
“The baddy?”

  “Yes, she sounds really awful and she’ll crow over Mother Francis, the good one. It’s awful to let her in for all this.”

  “It’s much better than ringing the bad one and bringing all the torments of hell down on yourself for nothing.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “Good. Will you go and tell that Sister there, she’s beginning to think you have delayed concussion or something. And by the way, put someone medical on to tell her about Eve’s injuries. You’ll only frighten her to death.”

  “Why do you not want to tell your parents?”

  “Because my mother works in a hotel shop where they don’t really go a bundle on employing married women in the first place, so I don’t want to get her all into a fluster for nothing. And my father …” Nan paused.

  Benny waited.

  “My father, that’s different.”

  “You mean he wouldn’t care?”

  “No, I mean the very opposite, he’d care too much. He’d come in here ranting and raving and making an exhibition of himself, saying that his poor little girl was injured, scarred for life and who was to blame.”

  Benny smiled.

  “I mean it. He’s always been like that. It’s good and bad. Good mainly because it means I can get what I want.”

  “And bad?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Bad too.” Nan shrugged. The confidences were over.

  “Go on and ring the Good Sister before we have the starched apron in on us again.”

  Kit Hegarty was in the big front bedroom, the one she had let to the two brothers from Galway. Nice sensible boys she thought, well brought up by their mother, hung their clothes up neatly, which made a nice change. They wouldn’t be much trouble during the year, one doing Agriculture, one studying for a B. Comm. No matter what they said, it was the farmers who had the money. There were a good many farmers’ sons going in the doors of University College today for the first time.

  She thought of her own son amongst the crowd today. He would walk up those steps with a confidence he didn’t feel, she knew that. She had seen so many of the students set out from her door, awkward and anxious, and after a few weeks it was as if they had been studying there all their lives.

  It would be easier for Frank because he knew Dublin already. He didn’t have to get to know a new city like the boys from the country did.

  She heard the front gate squeak open, and as she saw the two young Garda officers look up at the windows and come slowly up her path, Kit Hegarty suddenly knew without any doubt what they were coming to tell her.

  Jack Foley had met several fellows from school. Not necessarily close friends, but it was amazing how welcome they were in that sea of faces. And they too seemed glad to see him.

  There was an introductory lecture at twelve, but until then there wasn’t much to do except get their bearings.

  “It’s like school without the teachers,” said Aidan Lynch, who had paid very little attention to any teacher during his days at school with Jack Foley.

  “This is what’s meant to be forming our character, remember?” Jack said. “It’s like being on your honor to work all the time.”

  “Which means we don’t have to work at all,” Aidan said cheerfully. “Will we go round the corner to Leeson Street. I saw armies of beautiful women all heading in that direction.”

  Aidan was a better authority on women than any of the rest of them so they followed him willingly.

  At the corner they saw that there had been an accident. People still stood around talking about it. It was a student, they said, very badly hurt, possibly dead. The blanket was over his face when they carried him away.

  He had been on that motorbike, which was in bits over beside the wall. Someone said he was going to be doing Engineering.

  Aidan looked at the twisted wreck of steel and metal.

  “Jesus, I hope it wasn’t that fellow who was canning peas in Peterborough with me during the summer. That’s the bike he was getting. Frank Hegarty. He was going to do Engineering.”

  “There could have been hundreds of people …” Jack Foley began, but then he saw the car that had been pulled away from the corner where it had crashed. There was blood and glass all over the road. The car had been moved in order to let the traffic get through.

  It was his father’s car.

  “Was anyone else hurt?”

  “A girl. A young girl. She looked very bad,” said the man. The kind of man you always find at an accident, full of information and pessimism.

  “And the man, the man driving the car?”

  “Oh, he was all right. Big fancy coat on him, with a bit of fur on the collar. You know the type. Walked out of the car, giving orders left, right and center, just like a general.”

  “He’s a doctor, he’s meant to do that,” Jack said defensively.

  “How do you know that?” Aidan Lynch was astonished.

  “It’s our car. You go on and have coffee. I’m going into the hospital to see if he is all right.”

  He ran across the wet road and over to the hospital entrance before any of them could answer him.

  “Come on,” Aidan said. “The main thing with women is to be the first person they meet. They love that. It gives you a huge advantage.”

  It was much easier to tell Mother Francis than Benny had feared. She had been calm and not at all put out about Eve having abandoned all the plans that had been so carefully thought out for her. She had also been very practical.

  “Tell me as simply and quickly as you can Bernadette, where does Mother Clare think that Eve is today?”

  “Well, Mother …” Benny felt as if she were eight years of age again, instead of almost eighteen. “It’s a bit awkward …” It was partly to do with Mother Francis calling her “Bernadette.” It put her straight back in the classroom, in her gymslip again.

  “Yes, I’m sure, but the best thing is if I know everything, then I can judge how much has to be said to Mother Clare.” The nun’s voice was smooth. Surely she couldn’t be planning to go along with the lies.

  Benny risked it. “I think she thinks that Eve is sort of in hospital already. I think that’s what Eve would have been telling you had she been able to give you a ring …”

  “Yes, of course, she would. Please stop fretting, Bernadette. I am much more concerned that Eve gets well and is aware that we have all made things easier. Can you give me more details …”

  Biting the corner of her lip, Benny haltingly told a tale of mythical blood tests. It was noted crisply.

  “Thank you Bernadette. Now can you put me on to someone qualified to tell me about Eve’s injuries.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Bernadette?”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  “Ring your father at work first. Say you couldn’t get through to your mother. It’s easier to talk to men. They fuss a lot less.

  “But look at you, Mother, you don’t fuss at all.”

  “Ah, child, I’m different altogether. I’m a nun,” she said.

  Benny gave the phone to the Sister, and sat down with her head in her hands.

  “Was it awful?” Nan was sympathetic.

  “No, like you said, it was easy.”

  “It always is, if you do it right.”

  “Now, I have to ring my parents. How do I do that right?”

  “Well, what are you hiding from them?” Nan seemed amused.

  “Nothing. It’s just that they’ll make such a fuss. They think of me as in nappies.”

  “It all depends on how you begin. Don’t say, ‘Something terrible happened.’ ”

  “What do I start with, then?”

  Nan was impatient. “Maybe you should be in nappies,” she snapped. Benny felt her heart sink. It was probably true. She was a big baby, soft in the head.

  “Hello, Father,” she said into the phone. “It’s Benny. I’m absolutely fine, Father, I was trying to ring Mother but there was something wrong with the number. Wouldn�
�t it be great to have the automatic exchange?” She looked across at Nan, who was giving the thumbs-up sign

  “No, I’m not actually in the College, but I’m just beside it. These people here are very overcareful you know, they just like to cover every eventuality so they asked us all to ring our families even though there isn’t a thing wrong …”

  Sean Walsh ran through Knockglen to tell the news to Annabel Hogan. Mrs. Healy saw him running as she looked from her bow window and knew that something must be amiss. That young man always moved very correctly. He didn’t pause as Dessie Burns called out to him from the hardware shop, he didn’t notice Mr. Kennedy looking over his glasses at all the bottles and apothecary jars in the window display of the chemist’s shop. He ran past the chip shop where he had had coffee with Benny only last night, past the newsagents, the sweetshop, the pub and Paccy Moore’s cobbler’s shop. Up the short avenue to the Hogans’ house; the ground was wet and covered with leaves. If he owned this house, he thought to himself, he would give it a good coat of paint, put a smart gate on it. Something more imposing than the way the Hogans had it.

  Patsy answered the door. “Sean,” she said, without much enthusiasm.

  Sean felt his cheeks redden slightly. If he were master of the house, no maid would address a senior employee of the master’s by his Christian name. It would be Mr. Walsh, thank you very much, or sir. And she would wear something to show that she was a maid, a uniform, or a white collar and apron anyway.

  “Is Mrs. Hogan at home?” he asked haughtily.

  “Come in, she’s on the phone,” Patsy said casually.

  “The phone? It’s working again?”

  “It never wasn’t.” Patsy shrugged.

  She led him into the sitting room. He could hear Mrs. Hogan in the distance talking to someone. They had the phone in the breakfast room off the kitchen. He wouldn’t have had it that way. A telephone should be on a half-moon table in the hall. A highly polished table under a mirror, perhaps a bowl of flowers beside it reflecting in the table. Sean had always looked around him when he went into people’s houses. He wanted to know how things should be done. For when the time came.